Hard ‘Boyled’: Sony, Chris Brown Cash in on Viral Wedding Video

We couldn’t help making fun of Simon Cowell and company for failing to earn a single cent from Susan Boyle’s runaway YouTube success earlier this year. It appears the rightsholders behind another surprise YouTube smash hit — the “wedding dance” video that’s been making the rounds — learned from that mistake.

On YouTube’s business blog, technical account manager Chris LaRosa and music partner manager Ali Sandler describe how Chris Brown and Sony Music managed to capitalize on the 12 million-plus times people have watched the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” video, which shows Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party boogieing down to the Chris Brown song “Forever.”

“The rights holders for ‘Forever’ used [YouTube’s content management tools] to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes,” they wrote.

Unlike the rightsholders of the Susan Boyle video, Chris Brown’s label and publisher did not let this opportunity slip through their fingers. Not only did the song rise to No. 4 in the iTunes music store and No. 3 on Amazon, partly as a result of YouTube’s links, but Sony and Chris Brown also collect a share of revenue from Google’s text ads on the page itself.

The wedding video is inspiring people to click through from YouTube to Amazon and iTunes at twice the normal rate, according to LaRosa and Sandler. And the effect appears to be spreading to YouTube’s official music video page for the song, where they say the click-thru rate has increased 250 percent over the past week.

Simon Cowell, take note: If you get your ducks in a row fast enough, you too can make money when the world loses its mind over one of your videos.

Unfortunately the newlyweds depicted in the video aren’t making any money from the video’s millions of views, which would have surely helped defray their wedding and honeymoon costs. YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Neilsen confirmed that Sony is the one monetizing the video, and that the people depicted in the video are not part of the revenue equation.